Organization Name Linked Data

Alphabetical Index

Overview

The NCSU Organization Name Linked Data (ONLD) is based on the NCSU
Organization Name Authority, a tool maintained by the Acquisitions
& Discovery department since 2009 to manage the variant forms of
name for journal and e-resource publishers, providers, and vendors
in E-Matrix, our locally-developed electronic resource management
system (ERMS). The Organization Name Authority was first described
by Kristen Blake (Wilson) & Jacquie Samples in "Creating
organization name authority within an electronic resources
management system," Library Resources and Technical Resources,
53(2), 2009, p. 94-97, which is available online here.

The names chosen as the authorized form reflect an acquisitions,
rather than bibliographic, orientation. For example, in the Library
of Congress Name Authority File, the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers is represented by the full name, where as in
the NCSU ONLD, it appears as "IEEE," which is how it is generally
known among acquisitions staff. Also, there are many subsidiary
units with valid headings in the LC Name Authority File but for the
purpose of managing journals and electronic resources they are
simply considered to be variant forms of names for the parent
organization that manages acquisitions and licensing-related
functions for the subsidiaries.

The information in the NCSU Organization Name Linked Data are
represented as RDF triples using properties from the SKOS, RDF Schema, FOAF, and OWL vocabularies.
Clicking on the name of each property will take users to the
property's definition. The authorized form of name for each
organization is recorded with skos:prefLabel and variant forms of name were recorded with
skos:altLabel. All of the organizations are associated with
relevant classes in several popular vocabularies using rdf:type. The webpage of the organization is recorded using
foaf:homepage.

The data is available in RDF-XML, N-Triples, N3/Turtle, and JSON-LD. RDF triples can also be
extracted from the RDFa metadata embedded in the HTML page for for each
organization.

This data set will also be the seed data for organizations in the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb), a
freely available data repository with key publication information
about electronic resources that will have its public release in
September. As a part of NCSU’s lead role in the GOKb project, we are
collaborating with the GOKb developers on future linked data
initiatives involving title, package and platform data.

Tools Used

Open Refine - Formerly
Google Refine, an open source data cleanup and transformation
tool. The RDF Refine
extension was used to test batch searching for relevant URIs
from DBpedia.

Sesame 2.7.11 - Open
source triple store used for experimenting with conversions to
various RDF serializations.

Organization Name URI Look Up Script

During the initial development of this data set, Acquisitions &
Discovery staff conducted manual searches of other linked data sets
to find matching URIs that could be added as links using the skos:closeMatch property. This was a time-consuming process
and we later experimented with various ways of conducting automated
searches of other linked data sets for matching URIs. The most
effective approach was the LCNAF Named Entity Reconciliation script created by Matt
Carruthers at the University of Michigan Library. The ONLD project
team modified this script to search for VIAF, LCNAF, ISNI and
DBpedia identifiers for the organizations in our data set.

Below are links to the Organization Name URI Look Up Script and a
sample set of organizations to load into OpenRefine as a project. To
run the script, navigate to the "Undo / Redo" tab, click on the
"Apply" button and paste the script into the text box and click the
"Perform Operations" button. Running the script on this list should
take approximately 9 minutes.